BMC finds secret dance bars featuring mannequins

Mumbai. BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation) has claimed to find secret clubs and dance bars where mannequins perform wearing nothing but lingerie. The corporation has asked the state government to ban such bars to curb sex crimes.

Faking News could find one such club “The Teasing Eve”, which opened last week. It is home to two dozen full size “ex-retail” female mannequins sporting designer underwear.

Some of the most famous girls among the mannequin crazy men of Mumbai

“We never realized people would find these things so sexy,” says owner, Jayant Kapur, “but now we realize that not everyone is as comfortable with real women as we thought. Our regular customers include boys and young men who are otherwise awkward when interacting with real women.”

In the name of journalism, Faking News sat on a bar stool in the corner and watched groups of well dressed men go weak at the knees as mannequins in lacey panties “danced” for them.

“They don’t actually dance,” explained Radheyshyam, 63, who is paid to sweep the floor and “escort the girls”, “We found a load of old vinyl record players and bought the lot, so they just spin round and round.”

Before he could tell us more, he was called to deal with an angry customer who had bought champagne for “mannequin 12” (known as “Sonia”) and had slapped her when she “refused to drink it”.

“Customer interaction” is a common occurrence, explained Kapur. The previous week he lost one of his best “girls”. A customer wanted to marry her and Kapur, in the absence of some Chinese plastics factory worker, was the closest thing she had to a father.

“I agreed,” he told us, “I got 30 lakh rupees for her, but he was a local big man and I couldn’t refuse. I think he was in politics.”

He would not say which sena party and assured us that the mannequin was now “much more respectably dressed”.

“This is a characteristic of liquid hyper modernity,” said a passing sociologist, “Corruption, scams, spot-fixing, Sachin retiring… no one knows what to believe or what is real anymore.”

Faking News pointed out that our correspondents and most people we knew could spot a real woman from a piece of plastic at fifty paces, to which we were told “Yes, but you’re not in politics”.